technological and economic origins of the information society
(Harvard University Press: 1986)

“To say that the
advanced industrial world is rapidly becoming an Information Society
may already be a cliché.... But why...[and] why now? Material
culture has also been crucial throughout human history, after all, and
yet capital did not displace land as the major economic base until the
Industrial Revolution. To what comparable technological and economic
‘revolution’ might we attribute the emergence of the Information
Society? My answer...is what I call the Control Revolution, a complex
of rapid changes in the technological and economic arrangements by
which information is collected, stored, processed, and communicated,
and through which formal or programmed decisions might effect societal
control.... Once we view national economies as concrete processing
systems, engaged in the continuous extraction, reorganization, and
distribution of environmental inputs to final consumption, the impact
of industrialization takes on new meaning. Until the Industrial
Revolution, even the largest and most developed economies ran literally
at a human pace, with processing speeds enhanced only slightly by draft
animals and by wind and water power, and with system control increased
correspondingly by modest bureaucratic structures. By far the greatest
effect of industrialization, from this perspective, was to speed up a
society’s entire material processing system, thereby precipitating what
I call a crisis of control, a period when innovations in information
processing and communication technologies lagged behind those of
energy, and its application to manufacturing and transportation....
This explains why so many of the computer’s major contributions were
anticipated along with the first signs of a control crisis in the
mid-nineteenth century.”

(Beniger, pp.v-vii)

There has probably been more nonsense talked - and written - about what
comes after industrialism/modernism than almost about any other topic,
and whilst social scientists may have been less foolish in the main
than their literary/artistic counterparts, they’ve also far too often
betrayed an even shallower understanding of history than that of the
self-proclaimed “postmodernists”. However, as always, there are
exceptions - and James Beniger’s Control Revolution can easily justify its entry into that select group of works which are
necessary for the comprehension of our current state of affairs.

Moreover, its highly detailed exploration of the way industrialization
has driven subsequent reforms offers us all genuine insight into the
deep complexity of real social change...something all too easily
forgotten when we’re scratching about, looking for instant
“explanations” for whatever’s puzzling us right now. Instead, we’d be
far better served by an appreciation of the long entangled chains of
causation which Beniger explores, since they still clearly dominate the
world of today...

“The processing of
matter and energy and information develop simultaneously and in
parallel - neither can be said to precede the other in any general
sense.... Because industrialization involves the utilization of
inanimate sources of energy by society as a concrete processing system,
it cannot develop unless an adequate infrastructure for the movement
and processing of matter, energy, and information already exists....
[Therefore,] initial development of the tertiary (transportation and
utilities) and quaternary (trade, finance, and insurance) sectors may
just as well be viewed as a precondition of industrialization than as a harbinger of postindustrial society....
What made the Commercial Revolution truly revolutionary was that, for
the first time, distributional and control systems...could be sustained
indefinitely on a global basis. [And] industrialization became
revolutionary when the energy harnessed vastly exceeded that of any
naturally occurring or animate source; the resulting throughput and
processing speeds greatly exceeded the capacity of unaided humans to
control. What made the Control Revolution in fact revolutionary was the
development of technologies far beyond the capability of any
individual, whether in the form of the vast bureaucracies of the late
nineteenth century, or of the microprocessors of the late twentieth
century. In all cases, it was not the novelty of the commodities
processed (whether matter, energy, or information)...but rather the
transcendence of the information-processing capabilities of the
individual organism, by a much greater technological system.”

(Beniger, pp.180-5)

Just as the long-term changes potentiated by widespread printing
eventually led to both the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution -
see Elizabeth Eisenstein - and the Scientific Revolution led to
innovative social/intellectual networks that were crucial to the
incubation of the Industrial Revolution - see Joel Mokyr - so too the
chain continued, with the latter’s widespread impact fomenting the
subsequent shift. And, rather than the tipping point being reached with
the spread of electronic computing, Beniger makes the far stronger case
that it occurred in the late nineteenth century, with subsequent
changes basically a continuation of the pattern which was firmly
established by then. And the employment trends over time strongly
support this reading...because, rather than showing any radical
discontinuity in recent times, the trend towards information work
clearly began in the mid/late-nineteenth century - and the only marked
discontinuities in the trend since have come from severe economic
slowdowns.

Much of the difficulty we have in seeing the scale of the picture
Beniger draws lies in our easy acceptance of the innovations of times
past - and our consequent failure to grasp their actual impact in
context. Moreover, our labels all too often elide major changes,
offering up the illusion of strict continuity when, in fact, the real
story may be of radical change, as is the case with terms such as
“commerce” and “bureaucracy” when applied to the nineteenth century:

“In view of the
cultural and market control achieved in even the simplest societies
using kinship, religion, ritualized exchange, law, and social
networks...it is certainly not obvious why the nineteenth century
should bring a crisis of control.... [Western] commercial capitalism,
born in the Mediterranean, had sustained an increasingly international
exchange and processing of material goods...[via] stay-at-home
merchants who conducted their business through similar merchants living
in other trade centers, and willing to execute transactions on
commission. These resident merchants introduced a series of innovations
in the control of commerce beginning in fifteenth-century Venice,
including the systematic collection and processing of market
information, the standardization of commission rates, reliance on
private arbitration to settle disputes, and formation of joint ventures
to spread risk and preserve mobility.... This last characteristic of
the resident merchant, diversity of investment and function,
constitutes a major difference between commercial capitalism and the
industrial capitalism that would begin to supplant it in the nineteenth
century.... Diversity of function resulted, in part, from the
relatively low volume of trade...[while] the primitive
telecommunications of the same period...constituted a less often cited
but equally important cause of the resident merchant’s diversification
of investment and resistance to specialization.... Although protecting
the individual merchant from risk...the world commercial system
foundered for centuries in a vicious cycle, in which poor
communications and the resulting lack of information prevented the
increased specialization and control that would have made
specialization itself less necessary.... Profit sharing had worked as
the information-processing system of the [earlier] travelling merchant
only because the merchant ordinarily went out with his wares, so that
profits could be calculated among partners after goods had been at
least partly sold, and unsold goods thereby appraised at current market
price. Commissions afforded a much better information-processing
system, although not without a half-dozen other informational
innovations: invoices, bills of lading, ship’s manifests, a postal
service, systematic accounting methods, official clerks (scrivani),
and the standardization of prices, shipping practices, and handling
charges.... [However,] agents retained the one shortcoming common to
all controllers (like bureaucracy in general) based on individual human
brains: independence of purpose.... [The typical] solution was to
distribute the most dependable information processors available: an
immediate family member, relative, or at least a legal partner, friend,
or close acquaintance.”

(Beniger, pp.121-6)

“Just as the need to
distribute control, in the absence of any better control technology,
caused traditional values to persist in commerce, the rapid
disappearance of at least the American general merchant and his family
partnership in the early decades of the nineteenth century seems to be
due less to ideological or religious changes than to the development of
alternative and less centralized means of control.... Even in this
preindustrial period...the rationalization of commercial structures
paralleled the development of a national and international
infrastructure...[as] the personal networks of the colonial merchant
gave way to increasingly specialized and impersonal market
exchanges...and a parallel informational system of commercial control,
which increased the merchant’s ability to maintain distant and hence
less distributed control.... These same systems, it would seem, and not
changes in ideology or religious belief, constituted the most important
vehicles of transition from traditional to modern commerce, and from
commercial to industrial capitalism.... Internal (family) controls
could be abandoned only as external (economic) controls became
stronger...[and] industrialization of the external control technology
of information processing, transportation, and communication, as we
shall see in the remainder of the book, comes at the expense of that
transitional control.”

(Beniger, pp.129-168)

“Organization is more than mere order; order lacks end-directedness: organization is end-directed.”

(Colin Pittendrigh, quoted in Beniger, p.35)

“Foremost among all the
technological solutions to the crisis of control - in that it served to
control most other technologies - was the rapid growth of formal
bureaucracies....[as] bureaucratic administration did not begin to
achieve anything approximating its modern form until the late
Industrial Revolution.... Perhaps the most pervasive of all
[bureaucratic] rationalization is the increasing tendency of modern
society to regulate interpersonal relationships in terms of a formal
set of impersonal and objective criteria...[so that] the amount of
information about them that needs to be processed is thereby greatly
reduced, and the degree of control - for any constant capacity to
process information - is greatly enhanced.... [And] the rapid growth of
rationalization and bureaucracy...led to a succession of dramatic new
information-processing and communication technologies. These
innovations served to contain the control crisis of industrial society
in what can be treated as three distinct areas of economic activity:
production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.”

(Beniger, pp.13-16)

Selectively skimming through The Control Revolution for insights in this manner, however, gives too little sense of the
density of Beniger’s chronicle of these changes - and, in particular,
the careful analysis he accords each stage of the tortuous route by
which rationalization occurred. For example, the key role of auctions
in these shifts is exhaustively analyzed...as is their (swift) decline,
once commercial networks had improved sufficiently. Overall, however,
the key finding of Beniger’s enquiry is the multitude of different
causal factors driving the process - as well as their close (and
intricate) interconnection...

“Despite the modest
technological and economic innovations in control under commercial
capitalism, the world distributional system, even in the early
nineteenth century, simply did not require anything approaching the
degree of control that would become necessary under rapid
industrialization. Because capital remained so mobile under the
centuries-old commercial order, it served as the major medium...for
communication and control of the world system.... Not until commercial
capital came to be tied down in the British power-driven industries did
profit begin to depend upon the ability to manage not the totality of
one’s investments, but the processing of relatively much smaller
investments in raw materials. [Then,] the faster one moved these
throughputs past one’s fixed capital, the greater the returns on one’s
investment... [And] by the time Britain decided to enforce the
mercantilist Navigation Acts in its American colonies in the 1760s, it
was clear that many of the former luxury goods from the New World had
already become...everyday staples: sugar, tobacco, tea, molasses.
Because such goods could be obtained only in exchange for others, the
so-called nation of shopkeepers found itself transformed into what
would come to be known in the nineteenth century as the ‘workshop of
the world’.”

(Beniger, pp.169-74)

“Machinery itself came
increasingly to be controlled by two new information-processing
technologies: closed-loop feedback devices like James Watt’s steam
governor (1788) and preprogrammed open-loop controllers like those of
the Jacquard loom (1801).... Further rationalization and control of
production advanced through an accumulation of other industrial
innovations: interchangeable parts (after 1800), integration of
production within factories (1820s and 1830s), the development of
modern accounting techniques (1850s and 1860s) , professional managers
(1860s and 1870s), continuous-process production (late 1870s and early
1880s), the ‘scientific management’ of Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911),
Henry Ford’s modern assembly line (after 1913), and statistical quality
control (1920s), among many others. The resulting flood of
mass-produced goods demanded comparable innovation in control of a
second area of the economy: distribution. Growing infrastructures of
transportation...depended for control on a corresponding infrastructure
of information processing and telecommunications...[and,] controlled by
means of this infrastructure, an organizational system rapidly emerged
for the distribution of mass production to national and world markets.
Important innovations in the rationalization and control of this system
included the commodity dealer and standardized grading of commodities
(1850s), the department store, chain store, and wholesale jobber
(1860s), monitoring of movements of inventory or ‘stock turn’ (by
1870), the mail-order house (1870s), machine packaging (1890s),
franchising (by 1911 the standard means of distributing automobiles),
and the supermarket and mail order chain (1920s).... Mass production
and distribution cannot be completely controlled, however, without
control of a third area of the economy: demand and consumption. Such
control requires a means to communicate information about goods and
services, in order to stimulate or reinforce demand for these products;
at the same time, it requires a means to gather information on the
preferences and behavior of this audience - reciprocal feedback to the
controller from the controlled (although the consumer might justifiably
see these relationships as reversed).”

(Beniger, pp.16-20)

“Increasing the speed
of an entire societal processing system, from extraction and
production, to distribution and consumption, was not achieved without
cost.... Thus was born the crisis of control, one that would eventually
reach, by the end of the century, the most aggregate levels of
America’s material economy. Problems began with a crisis of safety on
the railroads, first with the intersectional lines of the early 1840s,
and then in the early 1850s with the great trunk lines connecting East
and West. By the 1860s, this safety crisis had given way to the the
railroads’ continuing struggle to control their vast systems to maximum
efficiency. As late as the 1870s...railroad companies actually delayed
building large systems, because they lacked the means to control them.
Meanwhile, the control crisis spread to distribution [as], with the
proliferating network of grain elevators and warehouses in the 1850s,
mercantile firms and other transporters had increasing difficulty in
keeping track of individual shipments [of commodities].... In the
1860s, this crisis in the control of distribution also began to affect
the movement of goods in the opposite direction: from manufacturers
westward to consumers. Commission merchants found it increasingly
difficult to handle the distribution of mass-produced consumer goods;
wholesalers struggled to integrate the movement of goods and cash among
hundreds of manufacturers and thousands of retailers, [and] by the late
1860s, with the rise of department stores and other large retailers and
wholesalers, the control crisis had become one of maintaining high
rates of ‘stock turn’ in inventory. At about the same time, the crisis
of control also reached the producers themselves...[who] worked with
difficulty to maintain competitively fast throughputs,
[while]...finally, in the 1880s, the control crisis reached the area of
consumption.... In 1882, a single miller
adopting...continuous-processing technologies to oatmeal produced at
twice the national rate of consumption. Clearly, the need to create new
markets - and to stimulate and control consumption - had reached a
crisis level in oatmeal.... As this crisis of control spread throughout
the material economy from the 1840s to the 1880s, it inspired a stream
of innovations in information processing, bureaucratic control, and
communications...[and] by the turn of the century, the crisis of
control had largely been contained. [But] only through the dynamic
tension between crisis and control, with each success at control
generating still new crises, has the revolution in technology
continued.”

(Beniger, pp.219-20)

Perhaps the best way to convey the surprisingly fascinating nature of
the detail in Beniger is to hone in on the specifics of the railway
revolution - and its aftermath - as there are many surprises
therein...even for readers who considers themselves familiar
w/nineteenth century history. However, when looked at with fresh eyes,
it is the details of commercial/industrial systems which prove
crucial...and which are neglected in all but the most specialist of
histories. There’s clearly more than one lesson to be learnt here, I
think...

“The American
Industrial Revolution cannot be said to have begun before the 1840s,
and the major application of steam power in the tertiary sector: the
railroad. Not the steam engine itself, nor the knowledge of
steam-powered machinery, nor established manufacturing in textiles and
metals, nor the growing supply of domestic coal and iron - not even
together did these factors bring rapid industrialization to the United
States. The explanation, once again, involves speed. As concrete open
processing systems, societies cannot produce goods faster than they can
move, process, and distribute throughputs to production, and still
maintain control of the system...[so] until this system moved at the
speed of steam power, steam could not be extensively applied to factory
production.... Railroads greatly surpassed canals in speed, regularity,
and predictability - what we have already found to be the key factors
increasing the need for control, [and] even the earliest railroads
could increase the speed of a shipment tenfold.”

(Beniger, pp.207-13)

“Dramatic problems of
control first appeared, as might be expected, on the railroads, the
first part of the material processing system to harness the speed of
steam power on a large scale.... For Western Railroad, America’s first
intersectional rail link, the inability to control even a half-dozen
trains quickly ended in tragedy...[and] as a result...the Western
management instituted a wide range of innovations in bureaucratic
organization, programming, information processing, and
communication.... Control of each train became centralized in its
conductor, who had standardized detailed programs for responding to
delays, breakdowns, and other contingencies, who carried a watch
synchronized with all others on the line, and who moved his train
according to precise timetables.... They are possibly the first persons
in history to be used as programmable, distributed decision makers in
the control of fast-moving flows through a system whose scale and
speeds precluded control by more centralized structures. This use of
human beings, not for their strength or agility, nor for their
knowledge or intelligence, but for the more objective capacity of their
brains to store and process information, would become over the next
century a dominant feature of employment in the Information Society.”

(Beniger, pp.221-5)

“That the degree of
control enjoyed by the directors of...interregional and national rail
systems was truly new and revolutionary in the mid-nineteenth century
is reflected in the fact that few of their innovations drew on previous
experience in large business, government, or military bureaucracies....
Alfred Chandler describes the difference: “The management of such
enterprises did not require the constant, almost minute-to-minute
supervision...of the railroads...[with] the coordination and control of
so many different types of units, carrying out so great a variety of
tasks that demanded such close scheduling.’ [Interestingly,] most of
the early innovators of the control revolution were civil engineers,
with experience in the construction of roadbeds and bridges, hardly an
obvious preparation for the control of dynamic systems...[although,] in
times of true crisis, it would seem, experience with the old
technologies provides little help in devising revolutionary new ones -
more theoretical and general disciplines better fill that need.”

(Beniger, pp.236-7)

“By
dramatically increasing the speed and reliability with which raw
materials arrived at a factory, and the speed and volume with which
finished goods could be distributed, the railroad created a niche in
the societal processing system for manufacturing at comparable
speeds...[but] maintaining control of these accelerating throughputs
proved to be a continuing struggle.... The essential insight: to
construct [factories] as processors explicitly,
with structures and procedures so determinate that information
extraneous to any particular function would be eliminated on the
designer’s table, so to speak, and hence pose no further need for
control. [And] because metal-making proved more difficult to control
than any other major manufacturing process, steel producers became the
first to design, build, and maintain - on a scale that involved
thousands of individuals - the concrete open processors that
distinguish all living entities.”

(Beniger, pp.237-8)

“Whether or not a
particular industry required new technology to control its throughput
processing, however, all sectors, because of the increasing speed and
volume of industrial production, experienced crisis in controlling the
distribution of outputs on a comparable scale.... As with the control
of production...early control of distribution came mostly through
innovations in preprocessing, in this case to facilitate market transactions, the processing equivalent of throughputs to production. These marketing innovations included - within a
fifty-year period - standardized methods of sorting, grading, weighing,
and inspecting, packaging in containers of fixed sizes and weights,
fixed prices, standardized sizes, and periodic presentation to
consumers via catalog. New types of retailers (like the five-and-ten)
came to be specialized by price as well as by commodities sold, with
general purpose containers (like grocery bags) and self-service
intended to cut transaction costs while at the same time speeding
sales...[whilst] all successful continuous-line food processors in the
1880s resorted to consumer packaging, brand labelling, and mass
advertising to control consumption.”

(Beniger, pp.248-78)

Having read quite a lot of economic/business history by this point,
what most impresses about Beniger, I feel, is his marshalling of a
myriad of details to support a highly complex narrative - without
either confusion or oversimplification. And whilst he’s not a poor
writer, he’s certainly no stylist. His real strength, however, is
structural - as perfectly befits a writer on this topic. In
consequence, even when the story becomes more familiar in the twentieth
century, he maintains our interest by stressing the multiple
continuities we had not properly understood.

“The smooth transition
from control crisis to Control Revolution in the 1880s and 1890s can be
attributed to three primary dynamics, each of which has sustained the
steady development of information societies through the twentieth
century. First, control technologies have co-evolved with energy
utilization and processing speeds in a positive spiral, advances in any
one factor causing or at least enabling improvements in the others....
Second, increased control brought increased reliability, and hence predictability of processes and flows, which in turn meant increasing economic returns
on the application of information-processing technology. When ships
depended on wind power, Atlantic crossings took from three weeks to
three months; hence little could be gained from attempts to coordinate
transatlantic shipping with production, distribution, or consumption
flows. Steam power not only reduced the trip to ten days, the
improvement most noted, but also made possible the prediction of
arrivals to the day, and even hour, and hence increased profits through
planning, scheduling and coordination.... Third, information processing
and flows, increasing in response to the crisis in material control,
needed themselves to be controlled, so that new control crises have
appeared and been resolved throughout the twentieth century, at levels
increasingly removed from the processing of matter and energy....[As a
result,] contrary to prevailing views which locate the origin of the
Information Society in World War II [or after,]...the basic societal
transformation from Industrial to Information Society had been
essentially completed by the late 1930s.”

(Beniger, pp.291-3)

“General Motors became,
more than any other organization, the model for...large industrial
enterprises in the 1920s and 1930s, [and] according to [Alfred]
Chandler, the structure remains today the basic organizational type for
companies ‘manufacturing several lines for a number of product and
regional markets.’ Central to [the] plan was the idea that production
flows and resource allocation be controlled by market
feedback...[which] served to integrate formerly independent divisions
into a coordinated enterprise, that optimized its response to changing
consumer demand.... In short, [the system] extended control of
production from the factory through his distributors and dealers, to
the customer himself - toward the ideal that literally no automobile
would be built unless a customer had already agreed to buy it.”

(Beniger, pp.310-11)

“In the supermarket,
well established by the late 1920s, retail distribution approached the
ideal of an open processing system, dependent on organizational,
preprocessing, and related control technologies to sustain rapid
throughputs of both products and purchasers, for healthy profits at low
margins, but high volumes. This can be clearly seen in the
institution’s most modern form: check-out cashiers now slide each
package past a laser scanner which reads a bar code printed on the
label, searches its computer memory for the current price, displays it
to the customer, adds it to the total bill, and reduces inventory
records by one unit. This processing system, in which a package not
only sells itself to the customer, but also serves as its own price
sticker and inventory check...could not have evolved, no more than
shopping centers and other modern retail institutions, without the
stimulation and control of consumption by national advertisers....
[For] local and national advertising, keyed to modern packaging,
promotional and retailing techniques, would provide the foundation for
the Control Revolution’s final phase: bureaucratic control of mass
consumption.”

(Beniger, pp.342-3)

Even this story - of packaging/advertising/p.r., which I’d thought I
was entirely familiar with, by now - takes on new dimensions in
Beniger’s treatment. By viewing the entire economy’s throughput as one
(highly variegated) system, he’s able to show us exactly why these
developed when they did...and the result is a surprisingly compelling
narrative:

“Economic depression in
the mid-1890s had demonstrated the shortcomings of the holding company
- so named because it had no operating facilities of its own, but
merely ‘held’ stock in a number of single-unit firms not centrally
controlled. If a holding company maintained prices high enough to earn
even a reasonable return on investment, it would attract to its market
competitors not encumbered by the need for second-order earnings, [and
while] price wars often brought ruinous loss of profits; buying out the
competition could lead to equally disastrous over-capitalization....
Instead, the president of National Biscuit, Adolphus Green, decided to
imitate the strategy of Quaker Oats: to shift from production in bulk
to consumer packaging, with control of consumption by means of
trademarks, brand labelling, and national mass advertising, vertical
integration backward into purchasing and forward into marketing, and
economies of scale resulting from the centralization of production....
[For] if advertising can be used to induce brand loyalty in consumers,
and thereby reduce the elasticity of demand for branded products, then
their producers could charge higher prices relative to costs....
National advertising may also enable producers to control entry into a
market by competing firms...[and] better control...the giant
wholesalers and new mass retailers...rapidly monopolizing the
distribution channels for their products.... Such advertising also
served as a substitute for further vertical integration into retailing,
[as] consumer demand alone could force a store to stock an
item...[while] so potent a weapon was the advertising campaign (the
word itself connoted battle) that even the relationship of the
[advertising] agency to its client became transformed...into one of
alliance and conspiracy...[in which] an agency ought not to handle
competing accounts. Thus it might be said that advertising afforded a
company greater control not only of competitors, wholesalers,
retailers, and consumers, but even - ironically enough - of the
agencies that helped them wage their campaigns.”

(Beniger, pp.344-9)

“From early
industrialization...increasing control of consumption had come through
the coevolution of mass media and their messages to attract, hold, and
imprint the mass attention. Power-driven printing, the major mass
medium before broadcasting, developed rapidly through the period of
control crisis, with a steady stream of innovations: the electric press
(1839) and rotary printing (1846), wood pulp and rag paper and the
curved stereotype plate (1854), paper-folding machines (1856), the
mechanical type-setter (1857), high-speed printing and folding press
(1875), half-tone engraving (1880), and linotype (1886). These new
technologies reduced costs even as they speeded printing, enabling
daily newspaper circulations to stay ahead of population growth even in
the largest and fastest-growing urban areas.... [Moreover,] half-tone
illustrated mass printing brought about a new medium of mass
advertising: the mass-circulation magazine...a new channel for
advertising, and hence the stimulation and control of mass production
itself.... Thus did the power of visual communication to stimulate and
control consumer demand come to be realized - nearly a half-century
before commercial television.”

(Beniger, pp.356-8)

What’s more, broadcast technologies then further upped the ante, as
broadcasting could reach people (including social groupings) engaged in
virtually any waking activity with a constant flow in which the
advertising could not be simply skipped over.

With the evolution of modern bureaucracy from the programmable template
provided by the railroad systems in the 1860s, there commenced a wealth
of innovation in office machinery and systems explicitly designed to
exploit this form. At the most general level, there were arguably no
less than four major precursors to modern computing all well
established by 1890 - mechanical calculators, punch-card processors,
and early (mechanical) analogue and digital computers - although none
of these were as versatile as their descendants. Moreover, both
practical and theoretical developments were rapid over the early
decades of the twentieth century, to the extent that:

“The concepts of
information processing, programming, decision, and control, and the
intellectual stimulation of the relationships among them seemed ‘in the
air’ among European and American engineers, mathematicians and
philosophers by the mid-1930s.”

(Beniger, p.403)

And the links were often astonishingly direct. Herman Hollerith -
punch-card innovator, and hence the creator of the crucial modern
information-processing system prior to modern computers - explicitly
named the railroad system as his prime inspiration...demonstrating both
the rapidity and interlinking of innovation in the late nineteenth
century, and the extent to which such links have now been forgotten in
the age of electronics. This take-home lesson from Beniger is
astonishingly simple - our much-vaunted digital age is the direct
descendant of the crisis caused by industrialization. Moreover, the
form of the crucial innovations - when viewed from a sufficient
distance - reveals a type of patterning which also still prevails
overall, as different sectors drive the process at different times...

“[Our overview of the]
Control Revolution...reveals a steady development of organizational,
information-processing, and communication technology over at least the
1850s through 1880s, a period that lags industrialization by perhaps
ten to twenty years. Remarkable...is the sharp periodization of the
listing. Among the three economic sectors, virtually all of the major
innovations in control through the 1860s can be found in distribution;
much of that in the 1870s and later comes in production or
consumption...[albeit] major innovations in generalized control appear
more sporadically throughout the period. No less remarkable is the
similar periodization in the development of information-processing,
communication, and control technologies. Each of the major sectors of
the economy tended to exploit a particular area of information
technology: transportation concentrated on the development of
bureaucratic organization, production on the organization of material
processing, including preprocessing, division of labor, and functional
specialization; distribution concentrated on telecommunications,
marketing on mass media.”

(Beniger, pp.429-32)

“Most
bureaucratic innovation arose in response to the crisis in the
railroads; by the late 1860s the large wholesale houses had fully
exploited this form of control. Innovation in telecommunications (the
telegraph, postal reforms, and the telephone) followed the crisis of
control to distribution. Innovation in organizational technology and
preprocessing (the shop-order system of accounts, routing slips,
rate-fixing departments, cost control, uniform accounting procedures,
factory timekeepers, and specialized factory clerks) followed the
movement of the control crisis into the production sector in the 1870s.
Most innovations in mass control (full-page newspaper advertising,
trademark law, print patents, corporate publicity departments, consumer
packaging, and million-dollar advertising campaigns) came after the
late 1870s, with the advent of continuous-processing machinery, and the
resulting crisis in the control of consumption, [and] along with these
came virtually all of the mass communication technologies still in use
a century later.... By the 1890s...control began to be reestablished,
by means of bureaucratic organization, the new infrastructures of
transportation and telecommunications, and system-wide communication
via the new mass media.”

(Beniger, pp.432-3)

James Beniger’s The Control Revolution (1986) remains the best treatment of - in the words of its own subtitle
- “the technological and economic origins of the information
society”...no mean feat, given that it is now well over the age of
consent. That, of course, is not to say it should stand alone. As noted
earlier, it continues the story whose earlier stages we can best trace
via the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein & Joel Mokyr, but all these
also clearly complement the intellectual/ethical stories detailed by
Charles Taylor & Stephen Toulmin, not to mention Ernest Gellner’s
synthesis in Plough, Sword, and Book (1988). Add in W.H. McNeill’s Pursuit of Power (1982) - unlike all the aforementioned, not yet reviewed here - for the coercive side of the story, and you’ll have a
much better understanding of the origins of our modern world than most
professional historians do, trammelled as they are by the demands of
specialization.

Moreover, in a world so dominated by economic power, the story told by
Beniger - exactly how that power overwhelmed its traditional rivals in
creating our modern world - should be central to our collective
self-understandings...rather than limited to the specialist readership
this work currently is known by. Because, make no mistake. This is
basically how and why we’ve become what we are...

“Beginning most
noticeably in the United States in the late nineteenth century, the
Control Revolution was certainly a dramatic if not abrupt discontinuity
in technological advance. Indeed, even the word revolution seems barely
adequate to describe the development, within a single lifespan, of
virtually all of the basic communication technologies still in use a
century later: photography and telegraphy (1830s), rotary power
printing (1840s), the typewriter (1860s), transatlantic cable (1866),
telephone (1876), motion pictures (1894), radio (1906), and television
(1923). Along with these rapid changes...the Control Revolution also
represented the beginning of a restoration (although with increasing
centralization) of the economic and political control that was lost at
more local levels of society during the Industrial Revolution. Before
this time, control of government and markets had depended on personal
relationships and face-to-face interactions; now control came to be
reestablished by means of bureaucratic organization, the new
infrastructures of transportation and telecommunications, and
system-wide communication via the new mass media.... [Moreover,] the
later Industrial Revolution constituted, in effect, a consolidation of
earlier technological revolutions...[as] especially during the late
nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, industrialization extended
to progressively earlier technological revolutions: manufacturing,
energy production, transportation, agriculture - the last a
transformation of what had once been seen as the extreme opposite of
industrial production. In each area, industrialization meant heavy
infusions of capital for the exploitation of fossil fuels, wage labor,
and machine technology, and resulted in larger and more complex systems
- systems characterized by increasing differentiation and
interdependence at all levels.... [And] never before had the processing
of material flows threatened to exceed, in both volume and speed, the
capacity of technology to contain them.”